Race is on to find and identify 48 Canadian soldiers

Remains were buried and forgotten during the battle for Vimy Ridge

NEUVILLE-ST-VAAST, France — A race is on to try to locate and identify the remains of 48 Canadians soldiers whose bodies were inadvertently buried and subsequently forgotten 97 years ago during the battle for Vimy Ridge.

There is urgency to the hunt because the potato field where the Canadians were believed to have fallen fighting the Germans from April 9, 1917, is to soon be transformed into a building site for several small factories by the regional municipality of Arras to try to alleviate unemployment in what is a severely economically depressed part of northern France.

Norm Christie of Ottawa, author of more than 20 books on Canada’s warriors in Europe, is convinced that the bodies of soldiers of the 16th Battalion, 3rd Brigade, the 1st Canadian Army Division — usually called the Canadian Scottish — lie about 20 metres deep in rich soil a couple of kilometres from the famous ridge where it is often said Canada came of age as a nation.

Zivy Crater, France, May 20, 2014 — Fifty-three Canadians who fought in 1917 at the battle for Vimy Ridge are known to be buried in a mass grave at the military cemetery in northern France.But the bodies of at least 48 Canadians whose bodies were not properly recorded are believed to be buried together in a farmer’s field about 500 metres from this spot.Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News

“A Canadian Corps burial officer was to have arranged to have somebody bring them in, but for some reason they weren’t,” was what Christie concluded after poring over war graves record and official military accounts of the day. Some of those thought to be lying in the field were to have been taken to the nearby 9 Elms Cemetery.

“Their crosses are there, but their bodies aren’t,” said the 58-year-old Ottawan, who worked for years for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in England and France.

Examining a map with scribbled co-ordinates of the location of the battle, which was never given a name, Christie pointed to a field near a major highway that runs next to Neuville-St-Vaast. Give or take 30 metres or so, he reckoned that this was probably where the soldiers, who were from British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario, lie.

Dury, France, May 2014 — Norm Christie of Ottawa, who worked for years for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Europe, believes the records of at least 48 Canadian soldiers were somehow lost or forgotten so their bodies were not collected and moved to one of the many Canadian military cemeteries in northern France.The retired engineer thinks the bodies are buried in a potato field below Vimy ridge. He estimates it will cost about $100,000 to locate the remains of the soldiers from the Canadian Scottish, dig them up and move them to a military cemetery.Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News

“You figure this out by looking for statistical anomalies,” he said. “All graves are registered and these ones weren’t, so these soldiers were never accounted for” in several Canadian cemeteries in the vicinity, including one about 500 metres away known as Zivy Crater where 48 Canadians were buried together.

Christie runs personalized one-and two-week battlefield tours of France and Belgium for Canadians passionately interested in the minutiae of where and how the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought. The goal at Neuville-St-Vaast is to locate the missing, have them identified through DNA analysis and then be given a proper military burial in a new cemetery or in one of the many other Canadian cemeteries in the vicinity.

When told where Christie’s research had led him, a farmer tilling the soil with a tractor in an adjacent field said it was quite possible that Canadians were buried in the area who had never been accounted for, although it was the first time he had heard of it.

Neuville, St.-Vaast, France, May 20, 2014 — Just as WWI shells still keep turning up in farmer’s fields, so from time to time do the bodies of men who fought in WWI.The bodies of at least 48 Canadians who fought in the Battle for Vimy Ridge and thought to have been lost or forgotten in a potato field not far from where this shell surfaced in May, 2014.Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News

“We find unexploded shells all the time because this was a very dangerous place back then, so why not bodies, too?” he said.

Shaking his head at the memory of the epic battle for Vimy Ridge, the man added, “It was terrible what the Canadians and Germans endured here.”

That fact can be seen in a military cemetery located about one kilometre away where 44,000 German soldiers who fought at Vimy Ridge and in other battles against Commonwealth troops are buried.

Christie was inspired by the dogged, literally groundbreaking research of a retired Australian school teacher and amateur historian who noticed in 2002 that there were differences between the number of unknown Australian soldiers buried and the lists of the missing where a battle had taken place at Pheasant Wood between the Germans and Australian and British troops in the summer of 1916. The mass grave of 250 Australians and Britons was finally discovered with the help of aerial reconnaissance in 2008, causing a minor sensation back in Australia.

Two years later, Australia and Britain built the first new Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in half a century at Pheasant Wood.

Vimy Ridge, France, May, 2014 — Below Vimy Ridge, where a massive monument to the Canadians who fought and died during WWWI dominates the countryside, at least as many as 48 unaccounted for Canadians may be buried.Norm Christie, who worked for years for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for years in Europe, believes the records of these soldiers were somehow lost or forgotten so their bodies were never moved to one many Canadian military cemeteries in the area.Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News

The casualty figures from the First World War, which involved insidious trench warfare and poison gas and, for the first time, tanks and war planes, remain numbing to read today. On the allied side, more than 5.5 million died and nearly 13 million were wounded.

Casualty figures for the Canadians vary a bit, but of the 620,000 Canadians sent to Europe, about 58,000 Canadians were killed and nearly 200,000 were wounded. The bodies of as many as 10,000 of those Canadians were never accounted for. There are also 6,846 Canadians buried as “unknown soldiers” in Commonwealth cemeteries.

An engineer by training, Christie reckoned that a dig to exhume the remains of the Canadians near Neuville-St-Vaast would cost about $100,000. He guessed the most likely way to fund the project would be to “find a philanthropist” or to raise money with the help of the Canadian Scottish Regiment, which is now a militia unit on Vancouver Island.

Vimy Ridge, France, May 2014 — Hundreds of thousands of Canadians fought under the Canadian Red Ensign during WWI and WWII.That flag still flies close to the battlefield where many believe Canada came of age as a nation by defeating the German army.Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News

“It would entail a sub-surface examination using ultra sound and other types of underground radar to try to find enough gaps, if you like, to plot the underground strata here at about 20 feet,” he said. “That would give you a logical idea of where to start your dig.”

However, before trying to locate and recover the bodies, it is necessary to do a more thorough “paper search in archives,” he said. “But from what we have so far, it is pretty definite that there are at least 44 men of the Canadian war buried here, all killed April 9, 1917. All the paperwork points to that.”

While it is true that those 44 men were only a small part of the force of four Canadian divisions that attacked that day, recovering them is not only important to honour all those who fell in France and Belgium 100 years ago, Christie said. This particular battlefield, “is one of the most important in Canadian history” because it played a part “in the capture of Vimy Ridge,” he said.

Lively discourse is the lifeblood of any healthy democracy and Postmedia encourages readers to engage in robust debates about our stories. But, please, avoid personal attacks and keep your comments respectful and relevant. If you encounter abusive comments, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. This site is using Facebook Comments. Visit our FAQ page for more information.